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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Bumped: Che Guevara’s Foiled (and Forgotten) 9/11

NOTE: This post is by far the most viewed piece every posted on Diogenes Middle Finger, receiving over 21,000 hits (mostly from the U.S.) since it original posting last September. The interest in Che Guevara, a cold blooded murder who killed on a whim, puzzles me.

For those who missed the original posting, here it is.

Maybe you can tell me why he is worshiped as a hero? D.S.

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One man's revolutionary is another man's freedom fighter, or so they say.

“I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” gushed Ilich Ramírez Sánchez from a French prison in 2002. Ramirez was also known during the 1970’s as “Carlos the Jackal,” and “The World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967 Ramirez-Sanchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s “guerrilla” (terror) training camps started by Che Guevara in 1959. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed,” he continued during an interview with the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.

“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home,” raved Carlos the Jackal’s idol and spiritual mentor Che Guevara in his Message to the Tri-Continental Conference in 1966, “to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. These hyenas are fit only for extermination. Fortunately, on Nov. 17 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI foiled the “war” Castro and Che had planned for us “hyenas,” in some of our favorite “places of recreation.” On that Saturday morning, November 17th, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. took on “all the trappings of a military command post,” according to historian William Breuer.

The night before an intelligence puzzle had finally come together. The resulting picture staggered the FBI men. And these had served at their posts during WWII and the height of the Cold War. They’d seen plenty. Now they had mere days to foil a crime against their nation to rival Hideki Tojo’s. It was nearing time to swoop down on Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s agents, busy with a terror plot that would have made Bin Laden drool decades later.

Castro and Che's agents had targeted Macy's, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for detonation the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving.

A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, AL-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the years biggest shopping day. Macy's gets 50,000 shoppers that one day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.

One by one the ringleaders were ambushed. The first and most important was named Roberto Santiesteban and he was nabbed while walking down Riverside Drive. While this group got their man, another FBI squad had the much easier task of arresting a couple named Jose and Elsa Gomez-Abad as they left their apartment on West 71st Street. These two gave in without a struggle. The FBI speculated that as many as 30 others might have been in on the plot, but these were the head honchos.

Had those detonators gone off, 9/11 might be remembered as the SECOND deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

And For the Awesomeness of It All!

The Cult of Diogenes

THANKS FOR STOPPING BY

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